Pulp Fiction

#8 at the time of writing.

I watched this film when it first came out, I've watched it recently (this year), and I've watched it in between - and I have felt different ways about it at different times. Masterpiece of punk rock filmmaking? Or overblown self-indulgent tripe? Actually, that dichotomy sums up how I feel about most of Quentin Tarantino's output.

The strongest parts of this film, for me, are the off-beat dialogue, the willingness to throw the standard Hollywood screenplay structure out of the window, and the playful retro-fetishism. The weakest parts are the uneven pace and the occasionally grating turgidity. Weaknesses that, I think, were not as apparent in Tarantino's previous, more pared-down, Reservoir Dogs - but that become variously more apparent in his later films.

Worthy of being in IMDb's top 10 films of all time? Well... we're still talking about it, I suppose.

I do admire Tarantino's ability to turn himself into a brand - he tells everyone how great he is with such confidence that everybody believes him, and he builds a whole folklore around his movies, like he will only ever make 10 movies, or all his movies exist in the same world.

Incredibly, this film reportedly cost only $8 million to make, $5 million of which went on the actors' salaries. And it was successful enough to relaunch John Travolta and Bruce Willis' careers (and push Uma Karuna Thurman's into a new gear). Money well spent.

The Banshees of Inisherin

Unranked at the time of writing.

At the time of blogging, this is not ranked in IMDb's Top 250, although its score is high enough to be (presumably, it doesn't yet have enough regular American voters), and it certainly deserves to be.

2022 has been an amazing year of film for me: there has been not just one - not even two - but three contenders for new all-time faves. The third being this one, in case that wasn't clear...

I like a lot of film in my film. Many of my favourites are dense and dizzying (check out some of my top picks in the sidebar to the right). But I have a huge amount of admiration for a film that takes a simple premise and sticks to it with absolute purity. In this case, the simple premise is: in a small Irish community, 1920s, one character decides he no longer wants to be friends with his best friend. That's it. That's the whole film right there. And it's thoughtful, moving, beautiful, gentle, shocking, and - for all its darkness - surprisingly funny.

Writer-director Martin McDonagh previously paired these two leads, Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, in his debut feature In Bruges from 2008, which stood out as a memorably quirky black comedy. In the intervening years, McDonagh - primarily a playwright - has refined his filmmaking craft, while keeping a firm hold on his darkly twisted sense of humour.

I hope this film gets the audience, and recognition, it richly deserves.